Family members of Navy SEAL Team VI and special forces soldiers on Wednesday filed a lawsuit in federal court in Washington, D.C., with regard to the deaths of their sons, whose helicopter was blown from the sky by Taliban jihadists on Aug. 6, 2011 in Afghanistan. […]
The plaintiffs claim that certain disclosures of classified information by Vice President Biden and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta regarding SEAL Team VI’s responsibility for conducting a secret mission that ended the life of arch-terrorist Osama Bin Laden, placed “targets on the backs” of the servicemen and their families.
Bragging about the killing of Bin Laden resulted in the Taliban retaliated by blasting the helicopter out of the sky and killing all on board, according to the plaintiffs.
I feel bad for these families and have no problem believing Biden and Panetta’s culpability.
But sadly, this won’t accomplish anything. Any monies paid to the families will come from the taxpayer (i.e. be borrowed or printed) and so, the country as a whole is simply hurt a little more.
You can only really get through to a numbskull by hurting them personally – be it physically or financially. Until bureaucrats (at every level) are held personally accountable, acts like this will not effect real change.
The targets were placed on their backs but who pulled the trigger? – was it really jihadis who smoked the copter all by themselves? were did they get the exact coordinates to hit the target with a wired STA missile? Why was a commercial grade, vintage 1960’s helicopter used for the mission? Why were so many Bin Laden mission SEALs placed aboard one helicopter, rather than two? Were these SEALs deliberately sent into an ambush by unnamed agents? – those who create embarrassment, and problems for the current rogue regime seem to keep having accidents and suspicious deaths at the hands of jihadis. Will Snowden soon share the fate of Chris Stevens, SEAL team 6 and others?
Perhaps this was a trial run for the Benghazi “problem elimination” process.
“…disclosures of classified information by Vice President Biden and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta regarding SEAL Team VI’s responsibility for conducting a secret mission that ended the life of arch-terrorist Osama Bin Laden…”
Hey, come on now! You can’t compare the lives of a few commoners with the imperial majesty of the Presidency and its justifiable claims of success. The One, Barrack Hussein Obama, gave the word for that mission and he must be allowed to parade his nobility and puissance before the world. If a few mere soldiers must die, so be it. A small cost for the pride of the Great Leader.
/sarc
The Seals gave El Presidente his greatest victory. And he thanks them by sending them on a suicide mission in a 60 year old chopper the size of a small house. All by design mind you. Despicable.
Given his Foulness’s taste for betrayal and clandestine murder this makes sense. And It collects loathsome people around Itself, to do Its bidding.
I rather suspect that Hillary Clinton’s elevation to the position of Infanta came after his Foulness realised that she was of the same cut and cloth as Itself.
They release what might make them popular and what got lost in the whole charade was the fact they exposed national security secrets that wouldn’t help anyone other than the re-election of Obama. They got Bin-Laden…..Friendly fire if you will for the lives of the ones who actually performed the act.
Ask them about Benghazi and they suddenly invoke national security doctrine. Ask them about NSA spying exercises and they invoke national security doctrine. They are simply the most morally corrupt organization the US has ever seen and I would go as far as to say criminally corrupt as well. If your willing to actually look you wold see it too…liberal or conservative worldwide.
It may be that the Vice-President and the Secretary of Defense leaked information they should have kept close and I hope if they did it can be shown and they suffer appropriate consequences, but the contention that this “placed a target on the backs” of Seal Team Six is silly. The Taliban would try to kill any American or allied servicemen they could find anytime, anywhere, and they would have attacked that helicopter in any case if they could.
As somebody who has served, as somebody who has served *there* and as somebody who has lost friends there, this lawsuit is a load of horsepucky.
The logic the suit uses is that certain senior government members identified Seal Team VI as having killed bin Laden, therefore leading to the Taliban deliberately targeting that particular chopper. There are enough holes in that to drive a column of suicide bombers through.
1. Anybody in Afghanistan was a target. All aircraft, all vehicles, all choppers. There was no need for a special target to be painted on the one in question. Let’s see some proof that there was a special targeting (as opposed to, “Mohommed, there’s a chopper full of infidels! Sooot quick!”)
2. Seal Team 6 movements and deployments, like those of all SOF, are highly classified. How did the Taliban, assuming they *were* actually specially aiming for that unit, know they were there on that flight? Logic fails.
3. Al Qaeda and the Taliban have not been renowned for being buddy-buddy. There has been some cooperation and some limited AQ presence in Afghanistan, but hardly close cooperation. In some TB circles, AQ was as much of an enemy as NATO.
The logic sucks and all it shows is the sue-happy culture down there sucking blood from parental grief.
Frankly, jumping on POTUS (who I will say I think is a weak and confused man with floppy ideology) for this is pretty silly, too. He’s done enough stupid things that one doesn’t have to stretch to find more reasons to complaint.
“The Seals gave El Presidente his greatest victory. And he thanks them by sending them on a suicide mission in a 60 year old chopper the size of a small house. All by design mind you. Despicable.”
+++
The aviation battalion in question flies MH-47s, if I am not mistaken. While the basic CH-47 design is indeed Vietnam era, is has been continuously upgraded and remains in production to this day as the Gold Standard medium lift chopper. The version they were in wasn’t introduced until 10 years or so ago. So where do you get the idea that it was a 60-year-old aircraft?
Big? Yes, certainly. It’s designed to carry big loads. The Chinook is used for combat missions throughout NATO. It’s very good at it.
You call it, “a suicide mission”. By definition, that was a mission from which they had absolutely no hope of coming out alive. There’s a difference between that and a mission that went wrong, with people getting killed. The latter, sadly, happens all the time in combat. Pray inform us as to your special source allowing you to say it was a suicide mission.
And, while we’re on the subject of information, please inform us as to who told you they were deliberately sent to their deaths. “He sent them,” implies the President reached down and deliberately did that.
If you want to criticize the President, there’s enough real ammo out there without having to resort to, um, less-than-accurate claims.
Something’s despicable, all right.
Sorry Obama defenders Tim and The Tooner but your problem is that you believe Obama and his administration are actually pro-American.
They aren’t, and when you grasp that fact all the moronic moves will fall into place. Notice how all the Foreign policy blunders seem to favour one single group, islamonutjobs? So lets review this statement.
2. Seal Team 6 movements and deployments, like those of all SOF, are highly classified. How did the Taliban, assuming they *were* actually specially aiming for that unit, know they were there on that flight? Logic fails.
Funny how so many members of Seal Team six were put on one old bird, that the locals who were to be on the chopper didn’t show and were replaced, and that someone did blow it out of the sky. How would the “taliban” know? Becasue Obamao hates America and is pushing the Saudi Islamic agenda. He fed Seal Team Six to the enemy as a peace offering for killing Bin Laden. Just as he fed the Ambassador and three other Americans to the Islamopukes in Benghazi to cover up the running of Libyan weapons taken after Ghadaffi was turfed to Syrian Al-Qaida rebels.
Paraphrasing O’s statement: The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.
That means the future, Obama’s preferred future, MUST belong to those who worship the prohpet of Islam.
You might find it hard to believe but Obama is not on America’s, or the free world’s, team. He is in the pocket of the Saudi King to whom he bows (and who paid for his education). He is a tyrannical thug who hates liberty. Seriosly, there are “riots” whenever the Islamofascists think they were offended by cartoons or movies. Bin Laden is taken out and nada. Why? Because they knew that retribution was coming.
Obama’s policies only make sense when one looks at Obama as the enemy of America and Liberty.
1. Show us any place where I defended Obama. The fact that I don’t accept bile, paranoia and bias as reality does not translate to defending the President. Logic fail. I personally think that he’s going down as one of the worst Presidents in history, but that doesn’t automatically translate to his having shopped his own troops.
2. “Funny how so many members of Seal Team six were put on one old bird” So you figure that, when being flown into combat, members of combat units should deploy individually? How silly is that?
And you’re still beating the ‘old bird’ drum. The MH-47 (in whatever variant) is new, state of the art and based on the most-used chopper of its kind in the west. Why the bulldog fixation on age when the bird ain’t old? The model wasn’t even developed until a decade ago. Why the dependence on cliches?
3. “… that the locals who were to be on the chopper didn’t show and were replaced.” Funny, out here in Reality, there were a bunch of locals on board – eight of them.
4. ” How would the “taliban” know? Becasue Obamao hates America and is pushing the Saudi Islamic agenda.”
So the TB knew that Seal Team 6 was on a specific chopper because the President hates America. Riiiight…
5. The rest of your post consists of personal attacks on Obama. Nowhere in any of this is there the slightest evidence (we’ll wait while some people go look that up) of anything but a military mission by a Tier One unit employed in high-risk activities going tragically wrong. Like that’s never happened before.
People having to depend on distortions, personal attacks and floppy logic to defend their case probably don’t have much of a case to start with.